The Harlem Renaissance took place at a time when European and white American writers and artists were particularly interested in African American artistic production, in part because of their interest in the “primitive.”Modernist primitivism was a multifaceted phenomenon partly inspired by Freudian psychology, but it tended to extol so-called “primitive” peoples as enjoying a more direct and authentic relationship to the natural world and to simple human feeling than so-called “over-civilized” whites. They therefore were presumed by some to hold the key to the renovation of the arts. Early in the twentieth century, European avant-garde artists including Pablo Picasso (1881–1974) had been inspired in part by African masks to break from earlier representational styles toward abstraction in painting and sculpture. The prestige of these revolutionary experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on African artistic traditions with new appreciation and to imagine new forms of self-representation, a desire reinforced by rising interest in black history. Black History Week, now Black History Month, was first celebrated in 1928 at the instigation of the historian Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950).

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